The
annual conference devoted to Nobel Prize-winning author William
Faulkner this year will feature the topic Faulkner and His Contempories
through six days of lectures and discussions by literary scholars and critics.

In addition to formal lectures, there will
be a performance of the folk opera As I Lay Dying by the Nashville singer-songwriter
group Reckon Crew, discussions by Faulkner friends and family, and sessions on
Teaching Faulkner directed by James Carothers (University of Kansas),
Robert W. Hamblin (Southeast
Missouri State University), Arlie E. Herron (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga),
and Charles Peek (University of Nebraska at Kearney).

The
Universitys John Davis Williams Library will display Faulkner books, manuscripts,
photographs, and memorabilia; and the University Press of Mississippi will exhibit
Faulkner books published by university presses throughout the United States. Films
relating to the author’s life and work will be available for viewing during the
week. Ms. Booth’s Garden, an exhibition of photographs by Jack Kotz, will
be on display in the Gammill Gallery at Barnard Observatory.

The
conference will begin on Sunday, July 21, with a reception at the University Museums
for Paradox in Paradise, an exhibition of mixed media artworks by Lea Barton.
This will be followed by an afternoon program of readings from Faulkner and the
announcement of the winners of the thirteenth Faux Faulkner Contest. The contest,
coordinated by the author’s niece, Dean
Faulkner Wells, is sponsored by Hemispheres Magazine/United Airlines,
Yoknapatawpha Press, and the University of Mississippi.

Other
events will include a Sunday buffet supper served at the home of Dr. and Mrs.
M. B. Howorth Jr., Faulkner on the Fringe(an open-mike
evening at Southside Gallery), guided day-long tours of North Mississippi on Tuesday,
a picnic served at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, on Wednesday, and a closing party
Friday afternoon at Square Books.

The
registration fee for the conference is $175 for students, $200 for Friends of
the Center, and $250 for others. The fee includes admission to all program events,
a buffet supper on opening day, a reception on Tuesday, a picnic at Rowan Oak,
conference session refreshments, and a closing reception. The fee does not cover
lodging, the optional tours of Faulkner Country, and meals, except for those aforementioned.
More information about the conference, including a printable registration form,
is available at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture web site, www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/faulkner/.

If
you would like to attend but have not pre-registered, you can still register in
person beginning at 10 a.m. on Sunday at the Yerby Conference Center on the University
of Mississippi campus. Once the opening program begins at 2:30, you may register
in the Johnson Commons foyer anytime during the week that the conference is being
held.

Even if you dont wish to attend
the entire conference, a number of individual events are free and open to the
public, including all scholarly lectures and panel discussions in Johnson Commons,
the Faulkner on the Fringe open-mike night, and gallery exhibitions
at University Museums, the J. D. Williams Library, and Barnard Observatory.

In
addition, tickets to the performance of As I Lay Dying are available for
purchase.

Following is a complete schedule
of events for this years conference. Unless otherwise noted, all events
will be held in Johnson Commons on the University of Mississippi campus.

Lecture: Getting Good at Doing
Nothing: Faulkner, Hemingway, and the Fiction of Gesture, by Donald
M. Kartiganer

10:30 a.m.

Lecture:
Invisible Men: Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and the Politics of Loving
and Hating the South, by Grace Elizabeth Hale

1:30
p.m.

Lecture: Fixing the Southern Vernacular:
The Contemporaneous Art of William Faulkner and Walker Evans, by Thomas
S. Rankin

3:00 p.m.

Panel: Turn to the Right: Sentimental Foil for The Sound and the
Fury?, by Eoin F. Cannon Parrotlike Underworld Epithet: The
Hard-Boiled Language of Sanctuary, by Peter J. IngraoLight
in August and Faulkners Sweet Man, by Steven Weisenburger

Faulkner on the Fringe, Open
Mike at Southside Gallery, hosted by Colby Kullman and Milly Moorhead

Tuesday, July 23

9:00 a.m.

Guided
tours of north Mississippi. (requires registration)

5:00
p.m.

Noyes/Smith/Kullman Party, 604 Tyler Place

8:00 p.m.

Lecture:
Cathers War and Faulkners Peace: A Comparison of Two Novels
and More, by Merrill Skaggs

Wednesday,
July 24

8:30 a.m.

Teaching
Faulkner I, Faulkner and His Contemporaries, Influences, and Parallels:
The Sound and the Fury, led by James B. Carothers and Robert W. Hamblin.
(Johnson Commons) Teaching Faulkner II, Faulkner, Writing, and Other
Writers: Getting to and from That Evening Sun, led by Arlie
Herron and Charles A. Peek. (Bondurant Auditorium)

Lecture: Blacks and Other Very Dark
Colors: Faulkner and Welty, by Danielle Pitavy-Souques

10:30
a.m.

Lecture: William Faulkner and Other
Famous Creoles: Writers and New Orleans, by W. Kenneth Holditch

1:30 p.m.

Panel:
Faulkners Modernism from the Inside Out, by Sean K. Kelly
Consciously Adapted to French Taste: What the Existentialists Learned from
Faulkner, by Holly Hutton This Time, Maybe This Time: Asynchronous
Faulknerian Narratives, Confederate Epitaphs and the American Iconoclastic Tradition,
by Timothy S. Sedore

Faulkner
and North Mississippi, slide show presentation by Arlie Herron

5:00 p.m.

Closing
Party, Off Square Books (registration required)

Rowan Oan to open  temporarily  for Faulkner Conference,
then remain closed until Spring 2003

July 15, 2002

By Lucy Schultze

Editors note: This article originally appeared in the July 9, 2002,
edition of The Oxford Eagle.

OXFORD, Miss.  William
Faulkners home will open its doors for one evening this month before
theyre shut tight for nine months of renovation and repair.

As part of the 29th
Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, attendees will gather at Rowan
Oak for a picnic dinner on July 24. Six weeks later, work will begin on the
first phase of a $1.2 million restoration project designed to preserve the authors
home and 31-acre grounds.

The house has already been closed to crowds
since December while the new climate control system to equalize temperature
and humidity inside the house was being designed. During that time, visitors
have been able to tour the home only by making special arrangements with University
Museums.

The house needed a break, said Rowan
Oak curator William Griffith. I feel bad for the visitors who didnt
get the word it was closed. But in order to plan for the preservation of the
house, we had to close it.

Griffith said that no special exceptions to
tour the home can be made once work inside the home begins after Sept. 3. Phase
One, which will also include the installation of new plumbing and electric wiring,
should be finished by May 2003, he said.

When it is complete, work can begin on Phase
Two, which includes repairing the plaster walls, repainting rooms in original
colors, wallpapering with original designs, and purchasing replicas of furniture
and rugs.

Currently in the bidding process, the $363,000
second phase has been funded through the U.S. Department of the Interiors
Save Americas Treasures grant program, with matching funds
from the Mississippi Legislature.

The University of Mississippi has also secured
a $479,000 grant from U.S. Housing and Urban Development to complete Phase Three,
which will restore the landscaping of Rowan Oaks grounds and gardens.

The first phase was funded through a $500,000
appropriation from the Mississippi Legislature in 1998. Original plans called
for the first phase to be finished last month  in time to allow summer
visitors a chance to tour the home  but the design portion of the project
took longer than expected.

Griffith said he hopes not to have to close
the home during Phase Two of the project. The grounds will remain open throughout
the restoration process, he said.

Rowan Oak was built by a pioneer settler in
the 1840s and purchased by Faulkner in 1930. He lived there until his death
in 1962, and the University of Mississippi purchased the home and grounds from
the authors daughter 10 years later.

Tickets for Faulkner Conference folk opera As I Lay Dying
on sale to public

July 18, 2002

OXFORD, Miss.  Tickets for a folk-opera
adaptation of William Faulkners
novel As I Lay Dying are on sale at the University of Mississippis
Central Ticket Office in the Student Union.

Performed by The Reckon Crew  a quartet
of singer-songwriters from Nashville  the July 24 event is part of this
years Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha Conference on the University of Mississippi campus. The
8 p.m. performance is in the School of Education auditorium on University Avenue.

Tickets for the production are $7 for adults
and $5 for students, seniors and children. To reserve tickets using VISA and
MasterCard, call the Central Ticket Office at (662) 915-7411.

The Reckon Crew members are Tommy Goldsmith,
Tom House, David Olney and Karren Pell.

The July 21-26 conference Faulkner and
His Contemporaries addresses how the Nobel laureates work is a reflection
of, and a commentary on, the major intellectual movements of the day. It also
explores the literary and intellectual relationships Faulkner shared with other
writers. A host of literary scholars and critics from the United States and
France lead lectures and discussions at the 29th annual conference, which opens
with registration at 10 a.m. in the Yerby Conference Center.

Lectures are in Johnson Commons.

For more information on the conference or for
assistance due to a disability, contact the Center for Non-Credit Education
at 662-915-7282 or go to www.olemiss.edu/depts/south/faulkner/.
Other information on Lafayette/Yoknapatawpha County is available through the
Oxford Tourism Council at 800-758-9177.

'Untitled Landscape' is among hundreds of accomplished works by Kate Freeman
Clark, whose life remains shrouded in mystery.

OXFORD, Miss.  Kate Freeman Clark left
her familys antebellum mansion in Holly Springs to become an accomplished
painter in New York City, then traded it all for the life of a small-town spinster
back home in Mississippi.

When the 81-year-old Clark died in 1957, her
neighbors were amazed by the news that she had bequeathed hundreds of paintings
to the city of Holly Springs, said Bea Green, curator of the Kate Freeman Clark
Art Gallery there.

Selections from Clarks work are featured
at the University of Mississippi Museums through Sept. 15, shown in conjunction
with the 29th annual Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha Conference July 21-26. Gallery hours are 9:30 a.m.-4:30
p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and 1-4 p.m. Sunday.

A contemporary of William
Faulkner, Kate Freeman Clark is an artist rediscovered, said Deborah
Freeland, UM Museums project coordinator. She has a very interesting history,
and there is a lot of interest in her work and the mystery that surrounds her.

Most of the oil-on-canvas paintings were created
from 1894 to 1914. They reflect Clarks style of alternating, surprisingly,
between dark traditional portraiture and the bright plein air concept of painting
spontaneously on location, Freeland said.

Clarks quest began when her widowed mother
moved them to Memphis so that Kate could take art lessons. In 1894, she began
studying with the noted William Merritt Chase at the Art Student League in New
York. Chase eventually opened his own school, and Clark was among the many students
who followed him.

Thirty-five years before her death, Clark suffered
a series of personal losses, which caused her to close the door on being an
artist. She returned to Holly Springs and left behind in a New York warehouse
many of her belongings and all of her paintings. Apparently she never again
picked up her brushes and assumed the socially-expected role of an unmarried
woman.

Upon Clarks death, a few friends
faintly remembered that she had studied art in the North years before, but no
one realized how accomplished an artist she had become, Green said.

For more information about Clarks exhibit
at the University of Mississippi Museums or to inquire about assistance due
to a disability, contact Deborah Freeland at (662) 915-7028 or dfreelan@olemiss.edu.

Do you have a news item about a Mississippi writer? Please send your
information to mwp@olemiss.edu.

NEW BOOKS by Mississippi Writers

New Orleans Sketches
By William Faulkner,
edited by Carvel Collins
University Press of Mississippi (Paperback, $18.00, ISBN: 1578064716)
Reprint edition, originally published in book form in 1958
Publication date: June 2002

Description from the publisher:

Faulkner’s early fictional forays that
foreshadow a Nobel laureate in the making.

In 1925 William Faulkner began his professional
writing career in earnest while living in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
He had published a volume of poetry (The Marble Faun), had written
a few book reviews, and had contributed sketches to the University of
Mississippi student newspaper. He had served a stint in the Royal Canadian
Air Corps and while working in a New Haven bookstore had become acquainted
with the wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson.

In his first six months in New Orleans,
where the Andersons were living, Faulkner made his initial foray into
serious fiction writing. Here in one volume are the pieces he wrote while
in the French Quarter. These were published locally in the Times-Picayune
and in the Double Dealer, a “little magazine” based in New Orleans.

New Orleans Sketches broadcasts
seeds that would take root in later works. In their themes and motifs
these sketches and stories foreshadow the intense personal vision and
style that would characterize Faulkner's mature fiction. As his sketches
take on parallels with Christian liturgy and as they portray such characters
as an idiot boy similar to Benjy Compson, they reveal evidence of his
early literary sophistication.

In praise of New Orleans Sketches
Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “the
interesting thing for us now, who can see in this book the outline of
the writer Faulkner was to become, is that before he had published his
first novel he had already determined certain main themes in his work.”

In his trail-blazing introduction Carvel
Collins, often called “Faulkner’s best-informed critic,” illuminates the
period when the sketches were written as the time that Faulkner was making
the transition from poet to novelist.

“For the reader of Faulkner,” Paul Engle
wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “the book is indispensable. Its brilliant
introduction ... is full both of helpful information ... and of fine insights.”
“We gain something more than a glimpse of the mind of a young genius asserting
his power against a partially indifferent environment,” states the Book
Exchange (London). “The long introduction ... must rank as a major
literary contribution to our knowledge of an outstanding writer: perhaps
the greatest of our times.”

Carvel Collins (1912-1990), one of the
foremost authorities on Faulkner’s life and works, served on the faculties
of Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Swarthmore
College, and the University of Notre Dame, where he was the first to teach
a course devoted to Faulkner’s writing.

Since the 1960s, William Faulkner, Mississippi’s
most famous author, has been recognized as a central figure of international
modernism. But might Faulkner's fiction be understood in relation to Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as well as James Joyces Ulysses?

In eleven essays from the 1999 Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner
and Postmodernism examines William Faulkner and his fiction in light
of postmodern literature, culture, and theory. The volume explores the
variety of ways Faulkner’s art can be used to measure similarities and
differences between modernism and postmodernism.

Essays in the collection fall into three
categories: those that use Faulkner’s novels as a way to mark a period
distinction between modernism and postmodernism, those that see postmodern
tendencies in Faulkner’s fiction, and those that read Faulkner through
the lens of postmodern theory’s contemporary legacy, the field of cultural
studies.

In order to make their particular arguments,
essays in the collection compare Faulkner to more contemporary novelists
such as Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Walker
Percy, Richard Ford,
Toni Morrison, and Kathy Acker. But not all of the comparisons are to
high culture artists, since even Elvis Presley becomes Faulkner’s foil
in one of the essays.

A variety of theoretical perspectives
frame the work in this volume, from Fredric Jameson’s pessimistic sense
of postmodernism’s possibilities to Linda Hutcheon’s conviction that cultural
critique can continue in postmodernism through innovative new forms such
as metafiction. Despite the different theoretical premises and distinct
conclusions of the individual authors of these essays, Faulkner and
Postmodernism proves once again that in the key debates surrounding
twentieth-century fiction, Faulkner is a crucial figure.

John N. Duvall, an associate professor
of English at Purdue University, is the editor of Modern Fiction Studies.
Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern
Culture at the University of Mississippi.

AUTHOR EVENTS: Book Signings, Readings, and Appearances

July 21-26: 29th Annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference
Faulkner and His ContemporariesThe University of Mississippi, Oxford